Thursday, 30 June 2016

In response to yesterday's
blog about the England
football team being over-achievers, a reader asks whether the problem of England's
poor performances is also in no small part down to the hundreds of foreign
players playing in the Premier League, making it hard for home-grown talent to
flourish.

It's a popular argument,
and one which has been made before by professionals like Steven Gerrard, Michel
Platini and Alex Ferguson. For surely the sheer number of foreign players in our league is bound to
make it harder for English players to get good enough to be top international
players.

At first glance, the argument
seems impeccable - the more English players that get regular match time for
their teams each week the better the squad of players the England manager will have. Unfortunately,
while attractive, the argument is probably the opposite of the truth.

The problem for the England
team (well one of their problems) is not that there are too many foreigners; it
is that there are not enough foreigners. Yes, paradoxically, the fewer English
players in the Premier League the better I'd expect their international team to
be.

Here's why. Foreigners playing in the
Premier League are there because they are good players. Therefore, more and
more good foreign players in the Premier League means it's harder for English
players to break into their club teams, which means at the top clubs you need to be a
really good English player to be playing regular football (a point I developed
more fully here).

The book Soccernomics seems to back this up,
showing that since foreigners started to populate the Premier League in greater
numbers (from 1995 onwards) England's overall win ratio is up by six percentage
points (although naturally other factors could be at play too).

I also remember reading
about how in the 1980s and early 1990s discrimination against black players
proved to be costly for a team's success. Basically, when team's wage budgets
were similar (a factor that is perhaps the biggest indicator of a team's likely
success) the teams with the fewest black players finished lower in the league
than teams with more black players.

When all clubs were deliberately slow in signing black players (which was sadly the case in the 1970s and early 1980s)
discrimination costs were not very high. But when some clubs started to sign
talented black players, the clubs that still discriminated paid increasing
costs, as results suffered as a consequence (I've blogged before about similar
discrimination penalties in the market here).

The upshot of all this is
that, as you'd expect, increasing the pool of talented players occurs more
fruitfully when there are no discriminatory barriers to that pool being
increased. And when the pool is open to footballing quality from all over the world,
the standard increases, meaning the standard required by English players increases
too. As long as the ratio of English players to foreigners doesn't drop below a
prohibitively low threshold, more foreign talent in the pool will probably
increase the home-grown talent too.

About Me

This is the Blog of James Knight - a keen philosophical commentator on many subjects.
My primary areas of interest are: philosophy, economics, politics, mathematics, physics, biology, chemistry, theology, psychology, history, the arts and social commentary.
I also contribute articles to the Adam Smith Institute and the Institute of Economics Affairs.
Hope you enjoy this blog! Always happy to hear from old friends and new!
Email:j.knight423@btinternet.com